Davis, CA -- The following information was released by the University of California Davis:
For centuries, nature has inspired architectural design, but recent computer-based technologies are giving architects new tools to mimic nature.
To explore this transformation, Christina Cogdell, an associate professor of architectural and design history at the University of California, Davis, has received a $225,000 New Directions Fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The prestigious grant will enable Cogdell to study for 15 months at UC Berkeley, the Architectural Association in London, and UC Davis. She will also conduct independent studies with professors associated with Tel Aviv University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At UC Davis, she will be working with evolution and ecology professor Rick Grosberg, philosophy professor Jim Griesemer, and physics professor Jim Crutchfield.
She will examine specific collaborations between architects and scientists and also explore the desire of some architects to grow living buildings out of cells, using computer-based design and production allied with technologies of genetic and tissue engineering.
"The Mellon Foundation is allowing me to receive training in the areas of computational architecture, computational modeling of self-organizing complex systems, and evolutionary science, which will allow me to build on my knowledge of past influences of popular scientific theories upon the history of art, architecture and design," said Cogdell, who is a member of the UC Davis Design Program faculty. "It is an amazing opportunity, because not only is the foundation allowing me to go back to school, but they are allowing me to go where I need to study with the best people in my research area."
"Self-organization" is a theory used to explain patterns that arise in nature without any external controls, from thunderstorms to termite mounds. Some social scientists use the theory to study such patterns in human culture as urban traffic, the form and function of the Internet, and the ebb and flow of financial economies. Architects are integrating its principles into contemporary buildings, such as China's Bird's Nest National Stadium, built for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
"This training will bring multiple benefits to UC Davis and its students by furthering cross-disciplinary inquiry between the humanities and the sciences," Cogdell said. "It will allow me to challenge students to think critically about developments on the technological cutting-edge of design and to become involved with cross-disciplinary collaborative research."
Cogdell is the author of "Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s," which won the 2006 Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. In the book, she defines eugenics as "controlling evolution towards a desired end," and characterizes it as a scientific design strategy for society that produced appalling historical consequences worldwide. Exploring the popularity of eugenics in American culture of the 1930s, she documents how prominent industrial designers infused theories of streamlined design with evolutionary and eugenic principles and argues that these designers approached products the same way eugenicists approached human beings: Both considered themselves to be reformers advancing evolutionary progress through increased efficiency, hygiene and the creation of a utopian "ideal type." Her analysis also reveals the extent to which eugenics and our commonplace beliefs about good design share fundamental values that to this day permeate American culture.
In addition to the Mellon Foundation grant, Cogdell has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, the Wolfsonian Design Museum at Florida International University, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center for the Study of American Modernism in Santa Fe, and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
Cogdell earned a Ph.D. and a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. from the University of Notre Dame.
About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that awards grants in higher education and scholarship, scholarly communications and information technology, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment.
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